Alan Kay at Demo: The Future Doesn't Have to Be Incremental - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o <comment><USER2> The core idea of non-incremental progress: Xerox PARC accomplished what it did in large part by forcing technology 15 years into the future. The Alto, of which PARC built around 2000, mostly for its own staff, cost about $85,000 in present dollars. What it provided exceeded the general market personal computing capabilities of the late 1980s. This enabled the "twelve and a half" inventions from PARC which Kay claims have created over $30 trillion in generated wealth, at a cost of around $10-12 million/year.

Kay also distinguishes "invention" (what PARC did) -- as fundamental research, from "innovation" (what Apple did) -- as _product_ development.

Other topics:

• Learning curves (people, especially marketers, hate them)

• "New" vs. "News". News tells familiar stories in an established context. "New" is invisible, learning, and change.

• The majority acts based on group acceptance, not on the merits of an idea. Extroversion vs. introversion.

• There are "human universals" \-- themes people accept automatically, without marketing, as opposed to non-universals, which have to be taught.

• Knowledge dominates IQ. Henry Ford accomplished more than Leonardo da Vinci not because he was smarter, but because humanity's cumulative knowledge had given him tools and inventions Leonardo could only dream of.

• Tyranny of the present.

<comment><USER3> > • Knowledge dominates IQ. Henry Ford accomplished more than Leonardo da > Vinci not because he was smarter, but because humanity's cumulative > knowledge had given him tools and inventions Leonardo could only dream of.

This really struck a chord for me. What I got from it was that many people try to build some form of success on pure IQ and get frustrated when they are outmuscled by knowledge in the market.

I think that cuts back to Xerox PARC as well - by focussing everything on IQ, they _created the knowledge_ that allowed Apple to be so dominant.

Where the talk falls a little bit on the obnoxious side is when Mr. Kay makes dismissive statements on how they created what others sold, just 10 or 20 years earlier. I think that ignores the enormous amount of work you have to put into connecting this knowledge that they worked out to the current state of mind that people are in.

Xerox PARC may have invented the future, but the failure of their parent company to bring that future to market shows that even with that knowledge at hand, you have quite a bit of way ahead of you.

<comment><USER4> >Xerox PARC may have invented the future, but the failure of their parent company to bring that future to market shows that even with that knowledge at hand, you have quite a bit of way ahead of you.

does it really matter that Xerox PARC "invented the future"? If not they, then somebody else couple years later. 10-20 years down the road it just wouldn't change a bit.

<comment><USER5> Alan Kay posits that yes it does matter that PARC "invented the future" because there were and are very few researchers working with the opportunity mix necessary. They had five years of freedom from business concerns, tons of ambition, the right context, intelligence and inspiration. Kay claims that the extremely unique situation and persons at PARC and previously at ARPA are what gave rise to the inventions. I think he would agree with you that other people would have made similar discoveries and inventions, if only they too had the opportunity and necessary materials. From what I have heard Alan say in his speeches his perspective is that the opportunity simply does not exist today, at least not in the necessary configuration to do what PARC did.

Check out this video for a more detailed history recounted by Kay about PARC and what led up to it: [http://vimeo.com/84523828](http://vimeo.com/84523828)

<comment><USER4> >there were and are very few researchers working with the opportunity mix necessary. They had five years of freedom from business concerns, tons of ambition, the right context, intelligence and inspiration.

A lot of Universities and research centers have the same. As most of them are, arguably, not a PARC may be these conditions aren't important? On the other side, we do have a lot of R&D coming out of Universities and research centers, so may be PARC isn't important?

i may sound like trolling, but i did listen live to Alan Kay once and honestly got more confused and got more questions as a result :)

<comment><USER6> University research is not free from business concerns either---the phrase "publish or perish" exists for a reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> When Tetsuya Mizuguchi left Sega to form Q Entertainment, he and his team started work on the famous puzzle game _Lumines_. Their stated goal was to create a game that was merely half a step forward, as opposed to their previous game, _Rez_ , which was two steps forward -- and didn't do well at market.

Smalltalk was at least two steps forward, probably much more than that. The critical thing that put it well into the future was the fact that it made the boundary between users and programmers even more porous. I'm sure many of you have heard the stories of teenagers sitting down to an Alto and writing their own circuit design software in Smalltalk. That kind of power -- turning ordinary people into masters of these powerful machines easily and efficiently -- is just the sort of revolution originally desired and promised us by the first microcomputer marketers.

But of course it didn't do well at market at first, so we had to settle for the thing that was merely half a step forward -- the Macintosh.

<comment><USER6> You might enjoy this segment from Game Theory about how innovative games don't do well:

[http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxhs-GLE29Q](http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxhs- GLE29Q)

<comment><USER8> Great discussion of this concept, thank you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Though a bit obnoxious i really liked the talk. Alan talked about 2007. If we look back it was the time when first iphone was announced. We all knew that in a timespan of seven years the processor will be much faster( Now it is almost 20 times faster)., connectivity will be faster, it will have better display and better sensors. But still none of the application that exists today (except games and animations maybe) take all this improvement into consideration. We are still stuck in old ideas of messaging app, photo sharing app, maps and news aggregators. I believe all those apps could have been conceived back in 2007. No one thought about any new use cases which can take use of the improved hardware. In fact some of the noble concepts like shazm or word lens were conceived 4-5 years back. Now we are stuck at a time where giants of internet are just struggling to squeeze few more bytes of information from user in sake of making more money from adds. It is difficult to believe after 7 years of first smartphone the most talked about event this year was a messaging app being acquired for 19 billion!! I think hardware engineers push the limits by going to any extent to make moore's law true. But we software guys fails to appreciate what is going to come in future

<comment><USER10> Consider that in 2007, the iPhone was _already_ effectively the result of years of waiting. In '99/2000, there was already touch screen PDAs with apps and various limited networking functionality, and phone functionality at least as early as 2002 (possibly earlier, I don't remember), and a few tablets had started making their appearance (both laptops + touch, as well as "proper" tablets). But they were all massively hamstrung by hardware (the first generation Palm's had less than 1/1000th the memory of many current smartphones; monochrome low res displays, and resistive touch)

Arguably, even in '99, the idea itself was _old_ \- those of us working on stuff like that then, were looking back at Star Trek and other SF, and it was just the feeling that it was an idea whose time had finally come.

Apple's genius with the iPhone and iPad, was realising its time had _not_ come, and waiting and refining their design until the basic underlying hardware "caught up" and they could provide a product suitable for "normal users". Everyone else got to make the expensive mistakes; most of the companies involved are no longer around, or pulled out of that market before Apple made its entry.

Sometimes ideas are just not right yet, and spending time trying to force the issue is likely to fail because the end result will be massively compromised.

But sometimes the ideas are just not right yet also because the public has not "caught up". It's not just that software developers must figure this out, but end users must have caught up enough that the new ideas fit into their world view.

<comment><USER11> >Apple's genius with the iPhone and iPad, was realising its time had not come, and waiting and refining their design until the basic underlying hardware "caught up" and they could provide a product suitable for "normal users". Everyone else got to make the expensive mistakes; most of the companies involved are no longer around, or pulled out of that market before Apple made its entry.

Aren't you forgetting that Apple made the Newton?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Allow me to put forward a historical analogy: standing in 2014 and arguing a case for gentle future changes in [pick your field here] over the next few decades, based on the past few decades, is something like standing in 1885 or so and arguing that speed and convenience of passenger travel will steadily and gently increase in the decades ahead. The gentleman prognosticator of the mid-1880s could look back at steady progress in the operating speed of railways and similar improvement in steamships throughout the 19th century. He would be aware of the prototyping of various forms of engine that promised to allow carriages to reliably proceed at the pace of trains, and the first frail airships that could manage a fair pace in flight - though by no means the equal of speed by rail.

Like our present era, however, the end of the 19th century was a time of very rapid progress and invention in comparison to the past. In such ages trends are broken and exceeded. Thus within twenty years of the first crudely powered and fragile airships, heavier than air flight launched in earnest: a revolutionary change in travel brought on by the blossoming of a completely new branch of applied technology. By the late 1920s, the aircraft of the first airlines consistently flew four to five times as fast as the operating speed of trains in 1880, and new lines of travel could be set up for a fraction of the cost of a railway. Little in the way of incrementalism there: instead a great and sweeping improvement accomplished across a few decades and through the introduction of a completely new approach to the problem.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For ideas on how to make non-incremental progress in technology, check out Kay's earlier talk "Programming and Scaling" [http://www.tele- task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/](http://www.tele- task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/)

<comment><USER13> This is a great talk in a completely unwatchable format. Here are links to mp4s of the video:

[http://stream.hpi.uni- potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_...](http://stream.hpi.uni- potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_SS11/HPIK_2011_07_21_01_part_1_podcast.mp4)

[http://stream.hpi.uni- potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_...](http://stream.hpi.uni- potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_SS11/HPIK_2011_07_21_01_part_2_podcast.mp4)

[http://stream.hpi.uni- potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_...](http://stream.hpi.uni- potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_SS11/HPIK_2011_07_21_01_part_3_podcast.mp4)

[http://stream.hpi.uni- potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_...](http://stream.hpi.uni- potsdam.de:8080/download/podcast/HPIK_SS11/HPIK_2011_07_21_01_part_4_podcast.mp4)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> A practical suggestion Kay makes is that one way to brainstorm start-ups is to think of technological amplifiers for human universals [1]

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Universals](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Universals)

<comment><USER15> Those are kind of strange, but struck a chord because I have been myself trying to discover these fundamentals which make us human and which most of technology is 'amplifying' (by Kay's terms). For example, music is not on that list which I personally think is one of the most important fundamental and which a lot of technology is built upon. Nor is communication, which is another fundamental and also a driver of a lot of technology. Maybe I'm thinking in a bit different terms, though.

<comment><USER16> I think Alan Kay put communication in his list. I don't think music is quite universal, certainly not uniformly and not the way we experience it now. He mentioned harmony theory as a notable non-universal, while almost any music you hear today makes extensive use of harmony.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One of the problems I've been struggling with lately is how to arrange for this sort of work, while still allowing the researchers to make a living. Governments and large corporations seem to have by and large lost interest in funding it, and a small company doesn't have the resources to make it sustainable. How do we solve this?

<comment><USER18> > Governments and large corporations seem to have by and large lost interest > in funding it, and a small company doesn't have the resources to make it > sustainable. How do we solve this?

Educating people as to where their tax dollars are going is always a good start. The average joe has some very, very odd ideas about the federal budget and how money is allocated.

Personal favorites: the way many people complain about how much we spend on foreign aid. Ask such a person how much we _ought_ spend as a percentage of the budget and the figure will very often represent a massive increase over what we spend now, since we don't spend much at all.

Or the way many people literally cannot wrap their heads around how much war costs. A couple of years ago an expert came out and pointed out that we spent more than $20 billion on air conditioning for our military every year in Afghanistan when you include road maintenance and fuel trucks and so on. He was a former general who had been involved in logistics but many people needed to just assume he was full of it, since that's more than we spend every year on _fucking NASA._

The trouble I see is that if you were a politician and you went around with the charts and visual aids a businessman would use to give a briefing and convey that info... you'd look like Ross Perot. So I guess he just ruined it for everybody.

<comment><USER19> The UK is just launching something to address this: [https://twitter.com/MattChorley/status/451773213497118720/](https://twitter.com/MattChorley/status/451773213497118720/) I expect it would be more difficult to do something similar for the US given the wedding-cake of federal, state and local taxes.

<comment> bjelkeman-again Got some other reference? That link isn't working and my mobile makes it hard to fix the link.

<comment><USER19> The link WFM, but try [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2596059/Where- taxes-...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2596059/Where-taxes-REALLY- spent-24million-workers-sent-statements-showing-22-goes-benefits.html) ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Thank you for posting this, the best quote so far has been this: "Prior to the 18th century virtually everyone on the planet died in the same world they were born into". This is a realization I never had, we take progress for granted but it's a precious thing actually.

<comment><USER21> Which is why I think the idea of change itself was an invention. Up until roughly that point in history people didn't apply themselves to change because they didn't even have the concept as it came to be understood.

Things progressed so glacially for so long simply because, from experience, nothing other than stasis could be imagined, not because we were any dumber. Change was the key innovation for change. Occasionally I wonder if it wasn't an inherently fatal discovery.

One wonders how many other such "basic" concepts there might be that remain hidden from view.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Perhaps he's a tad obnoxious, but he says some interesting things.

\- think of the future, than reason backwards

\- use Moore's law in reverse

\- an introvert character can be helpful in coming up with real inventions

\- be interested in new ideas for the sake of them being new, not because they are useful now, or accepted, or understandable

\- it seems good to sell stuff that can be instantly used, people however, like many other things. they might for example like to learning or get skilled. the bike example is one. but also the piano. or the skateboard.

At least, this is what I tried to grasp from it. :-)

</comment><comment><USER23> Hacker News is the epitome of short term thinking, with projects like 'weekend projects' etc.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's amusing that the same optical illusion has been discussed by Michael Abrash [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-2dQoeqVVo#t=453](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-2dQoeqVVo#t=453) and Alan Kay [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o#t=1534](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTAghAJcO1o#t=1534) in talks on very different topics recently.

> Thomas Paine said in _Common Sense_ , instead of having the king be the law, > why, we can have the law be the king. That was one of the biggest shifts, > large scale shifts in history because he realised "hey, we can design a > better society than tradition has and we can put it into law; so, we're just > going to invert thousands of years of beliefs".

Pfft, tell that to the 13th-century Venetians: [http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2007/HPL-2007-28R1.pdf](http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2007/HPL-2007-28R1.pdf) . Constitutionalism isn't that new an idea.

</comment><comment><USER24> At 15:00, he mentions research on the efficiency of gestures done in the 60's. Does anyone know what he's referring to?

<comment><USER25> Sketchpad by Ivan Sutherland in 1963, would be one.

It allows one to draw CAD drawings, convert drawn letters into labels, etc in a more natural way.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad)

<comment><USER26> Besides the Sketchpad, Alan always mentions Grail (GRAphic Input Language), designed by Thomas Ellis and programmed by Gabriel Groner and others at the Rand Corporation. That was from 1964.

As far as I know, Alan also greatly admires the work done at MIT in the 1970s like [http://www.paulmckevitt.com/cre333/papers/putthatthere.pdf](http://www.paulmckevitt.com/cre333/papers/putthatthere.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Stephen Wolfram's demo he referred to doesn't appear to be up yet, but this one from a couple weeks back is pretty sweet: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P9HqHVPeik](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P9HqHVPeik)

<comment><USER28> It seems to be up now at [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzYmO20N6MY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzYmO20N6MY).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is a great excuse for buying the nicest computer possible - I need to compute in the future!

</comment><comment><USER30> Playing Wayne Gretzky:

30 years we will (ought to) have cars that repel over the surface by a bioether [sic], possible emitted from the street - which have become (replaced as) linear parks that vehicles float over and never crash. Because of all the new park area, some kids in the suburbs (because they will be park rich) will invent a new game that stretches over a mile that involves more imagination than football, basketball and soccer - combined.

That was an awesome video. C++ == Guitar Hero

</comment><comment><USER31> The talk starts at 2:42 - [http://youtu.be/gTAghAJcO1o?t=2m42s](http://youtu.be/gTAghAJcO1o?t=2m42s)

</comment><comment><USER32> Anyone have a link to the Q&A after the talk?

</comment><comment><USER33> Firstly, I enjoyed his talk. It was pretty insightful into the ways so many businesses and corporations today think, and how we've lost track of building the future. However, there's one thing that really bugged me about his talk. It basically boils down to the fact that you have to take into consideration Moore's Law and have to pay a hefty sum to make any useful invention by paying for the technologies that are 10-15 years ahead of its time to do anything useful for the next 30 years. How does one "invent" in his terms today without the equity that he refers to which you need?

<comment><USER34> Also, Moore's law might be applicable to computing hardware, but it isn't necessarily generalizable to other sorts of inventions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> That 'universals' guy seems actually to be Donald Brown, and his book is 'Human Universals'. [http://www.amazon.com/Human-Universals-Donald- Brown/dp/00700...](http://www.amazon.com/Human-Universals-Donald- Brown/dp/007008209X)

The book is expensive, here's a list:

[http://condor.depaul.edu/mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm](http://condor.depaul.edu/mfiddler/hyphen/humunivers.htm)

</comment><comment><USER36> Totally tangential, but that intro music segment with Alan Key just looking around is total comedy gold. Ah, those cheesy conf organizers...

</comment><comment><USER37> For an alternative and cynical view of Xerox PARC, have a look at Ted Nelson's _Computers for Cynics 2 - It All Went Wrong at Xerox PARC_ (15 minutes video):

[http://fixyt.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU](http://fixyt.com/watch?v=c6SUOeAqOjU)

</comment><comment><USER38> I know this is really trivial, but I found the extended music intro and his unamused reaction quite comical. Over-analyzing, it's a juxtaposition to parts of his talk.

</comment><comment><USER39> This is very relevant to something I'm trying to build right now, thank you for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER40> A lot of his talk was wasted on irrelevant complaining about lack of capex in R&D. That's only partly correct. Any one of us can afford to rent a crazy amount of computing power and storage on demand. Pfft.

In short, skip the first 20 minutes. He's being a grumpy old man. In the second part, he's a pissed-off genius and revolutionary.

<comment><USER6> Sure, but do they have money to live on while they're experimenting?

<comment><USER40> His argument that 5 year timespans are minimal for invention is on target, but that's opex, even when you are cash flow negative. Where he is wrong is that you need large equipment capex for invention. Unless you are building a novel special purpose computing device, like an giant FPGA cryptocurrency miner, you really don't need more than $5k capex per coder for anything anymore, and renting Web-scale power is cheap.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Wow, he really comes of as obnoxious.

Yes what was done in Xerox Parc was really amazing and cool, but can you please contain your ego atleast a little?

This talk sounds basically like him explaining to everybody in detail how awesome his achievements are.

EDIT: The best point is where he explains with charts that 80% of people are basically sheeple...

<comment><USER20> At first glance it might come off as hubris, but it's actually just a way of separating what we now know as technology (consumer technology) which is mostly just incremental from the other kind of technology which is innovative and profoundly transformative.

When he talks about the research that went on at the Parc back in the 70s it's not to show his accomplishments but to show the difference between commercial products addressed to the masses and touted as technological breakthroughs and real breakthroughs that happen way before the mass production and slowly make their way into society and bring about enormous changes and wealth.</comment></comment>


New way of filtering RSS feeds - <AUTHOR> http://www.aiderss.com/ <comment><USER2> How are posts rated by this thing? How can I customize AideRSS's output to my own tastes?

Is this site just a canned RSS remix per site, done semi-manually (I can't add arbitrary RSS feeds, hmmm)?</comment>


A group is its own worst enemy... - <AUTHOR> http://shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

<comment><USER2> There is a great quote about a talk with Stewart Butterfield (Flickr) in a pre-flickr world :)

"I was talking to Stewart Butterfield about the chat application they're trying here. I said "Hey, how's that going?" He said: "Well, we only had the idea for it two weeks ago. So this is the launch."</comment>


Awk in 20 Minutes (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://ferd.ca/awk-in-20-minutes.html <comment><USER2> I learned perl in college in the 5.6 days, and did a lot of text processing with it for a time. At some point, I bit the bullet and learned awk, and I've mostly abandoned perl as a result.

Why? awk is small enough that it fits in my head, or at least the bits I need every couple of months do. And if I forget, it only takes 20 minutes to put them back in. perl, by contrast, is far too large to fit in my head and comes with an ecosystem that is much larger still.

I know I can use perl for what I use awk for, and when I've raised this point before, people have been quick to explain how to process input by lines, and conditionally do something. For basic stuff, the fact that that's basically all awk does[0] means there's so many fewer ways to do it wrong. I can't say the same of perl, even when I was more familiar with it.

caveat: awk, nawk, mawk, and gawk don't necessarily share the same set of corner cases, and you may not get error messages that make sense to you when you bump into one with an unfamiliar awk.

[0] I know, not really, and especially for gawk. I've written awk scripts a couple hundred lines in the past. It's true enough for the 20 minute version though.

Edited for clarity.

<comment><USER3> What are you using Perl/awk for that it's needed so often?

I've been a software engineer since 2005 and worked my way up to being a VP of Engineering currently and never had to use either Perl or awk (or similar). I often read about these tools on Hackernews and I find it quite mystifying as I manage to have written Java, Scala, C#, SQL, and so on for 15 years and happily never needed them.

Is this a certain kind of engineering job that requires searching through text files so often and requiring specialized tools? I've managed my whole career with ctrl-f, and highlight-all matches.

<comment><USER4> There are hundreds of use-cases. It is not important what the use-cases are. - There are two types of developers: Those who use hacking to solve all kinds of tasks that need hundreds of manual steps. And those who never think of automating smaller steps. The second kind of devs can be very good software engineers, but they prefer IDEs instead of tweaking Vim or Emacs. The first kind of dev will look for possiblities to automate repeated steps, opportunities for tweaking, transforming, hacking. For the fun of it.

<comment> dan-robertson I think this argument is unfairly dismissive.

I think it depends a lot on the sort of software one works with. A main use of awk and other unix tools for me is as-hoc data munging, looking through production logs, taking bits of data from different sources and comparing them. If you make eg gui applications and sell them or work as a contractor developing in-house applications for clients, you probably don't see a lot of production logs like that or process them that way. Any data that you expect to process ought to go into a database and then you can use sql (where joins work much better than the unix join command and you can use the actual structure of the data instead of trying to tease it out with the smallest simplest code you can think of). You might be using a debugger or backtracks or reproduction in test to deal with/investigate production issues rather than starting with logs. On the other hand, many other companies will have big production systems that run on lots of different virtual machines and produce lots of logs and have issues that are hard to reproduce (or maybe the logs are easier), and have lots of data spread about random places such that it may be easier to do the hacky thing for one-off cases or to prototype or whatever rather than Doing things more thoroughly or properly. And this set up will also lead to tools that are designed to fit into the rest of the unix ETL tack by the way they output or input data.

On the second point, I think that even as a die-hard emacs user I wouldn't recommend that anyone try to use emacs as an ide for something like java (or maybe c++). I'd probably try to use emacs a myself but I think my java-editing experience would be worse than for those people who do it with an IDE. More realistically, I'd try to avoid writing java if at all possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My absolute favorite example of what's possible with awk is this[0] calculator from Ward Cunningham about splitting expenses on a ski trip. It's a really beautiful little piece of code well-adapted to this problem.

[0] - [https://c2.com/doc/expense/](https://c2.com/doc/expense/)

<comment><USER6> This reminds me of a story of a guy who wrote a whole company internal debit system like this (coffee, meals out, etc) and it turned into a currency. I feel like I either saw it here, or a similar forum. Anyone have a link? My searches have not found it...

<comment><USER7> This one? [https://royrapoport.blogspot.com/2011/05/coffee-and-its- effe...](https://royrapoport.blogspot.com/2011/05/coffee-and-its-effects-on- feature-creep.html)

<comment><USER6> That's it! You found it! Thank you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is an excellent blog post. I will refer people to this! He touches on all of the important points.

If you want a more thorough/deep exploration of Awk, I recently gave a talk on it (virtually) at Linux Fest Northwest (LFNW) 2020.

Awk: Hack the planet['s text]! Part 1 (Presentation): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43BNFcOdBlY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43BNFcOdBlY)

Awk: Hack the planet['s text]! Part 2 (Exercises):[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UGLsRYDfo8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UGLsRYDfo8)

If you want to try your hand at the exercises, they are on github: [https://github.com/FreedomBen/awk-hack-the- planet](https://github.com/FreedomBen/awk-hack-the-planet)

</comment><comment><USER9> It's also worth mentioning that local variables can be simulated using additional formal parameters. In AWK, any missing parameter in a function call is initialized to zero.

Let's say we have a function CharCount which takes a character and a line of text and returns the number of occurrences of that character:

        function CharCount(ch, line,
            n)
        {
            ...
        }

The line break in the parameter list is an AWK convention and indicates that n is a "local variable."

<comment><USER10> I thought the convention was to separate local variables with three spaces like this:

        function CharCount(ch, line,   n)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I love using awk. It was fairly easy to pick up, and it slides into my command line workflow pretty well.

That said, there's an amazing amount you can do with it, if you really try. Someone once joked that I should try building an IRC bot in AWK, so I did: [https://github.com/Marcus316/rufus](https://github.com/Marcus316/rufus)

There's no pactical reason for it, but it was fun to play with the idea.

</comment><comment><USER12> Very nice conclusion of the language. However, keep in mind that awk is not the fastest language around. A pro awk thread might not be the best place to tell this story but it is fresh and true:

Last weekend I was playing around with some data. At first, I thought 'let's just write a line of awk and be done with it' and so I did. The execution took 20 seconds (about 17 million lines) and everything was fine.

Later that day, I came across another task which seemed too complex for an awk one-liner so I took two lines of R and was surprised when R was done within 5 seconds on the same data set.

I was happy because I found a faster tool than the one I had, but the lesson is, that just because you use a proven tool like awk, doesn't mean there aren't any better tools. _Find out_ what works best for you.

<comment><USER13> awk is a language with multiple implementations, so we can only talk about performance of a particular awk implementation. Which is especially true for awk because mawk (based on a vm rather than being a traditional interpreter) is so much faster than other awks if you can live with its limitations [1]. If you're using gawk, setting LANG=C also helps performance because no utf-8 honoring needs to be done. Speaking of which, I've noticed gawk on recent Ubuntus (19.10) appears broken and/or has regexp size limits breaking awk code with large regexpes (but haven't checked yet thorougly).

[1]: [https://brenocon.com/blog/2009/09/dont-mawk-awk-the- fastest-...](https://brenocon.com/blog/2009/09/dont-mawk-awk-the-fastest-and- most-elegant-big-data-munging-language/)

<comment><USER12> Arch Linux

      $ awk --version
      GNU Awk 5.1.0, API: 3.0 (GNU MPFR 4.0.2, GNU MP 6.2.0)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Whenever somebody says "Oh, I don't know how to use awk", this is the link I send them. It's easily the most useful tutorial for awk on the 'net. There's a lot more you can do with awk, but this site shows you the top percentage in a very short amount of time.

<comment><USER15> It's crazy how this reappeared on HN only hours after I went searching for awk on Hacker News. Fred Hebert is so well known in the Erlang and Elixir communities.

I have just coined this idea the "gateway drug" approach to learning new tools. We should strive to find those introductions that are small enough that someone can digest without a massive upfront time investment to get them past the front door :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I learned awk from the chapter on filters in the pamphlet sized book 'unix programming environment' by Kernighan and Pike you can buy for $8

<comment><USER17> I've heard many good things about that book, which is why I bought it several months ago. From the bits I have read, I like it. But I have not yet finished it, partly because it is not pamphlet sized. It is over 300 pages. But I look forward to the chapter on Filters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Very cool and I'm grateful for Awk to be presented in such a friendly way.

However, at some point, it makes more sense to write your Awk script in something like Python, and my intuition says that that time is shortly after starting a basic Awk script. Using a real programming language is almost always the way to go with code that will become more complex over time (almost all code) and code you have to share with a team (learning curve).

</comment><comment><USER19> By the way, Awk is whitespace sensitive:

       pattern { action }  # valid

       pattern {           # valid
         action
       }

       pattern             # not what you think
       { action }          # this action has no pattern

There cannot be a newline between pattern an action. This feature allows either the pattern or the action to be omitted without ambiguity.

       pattern        # pattern with default { print } action
       { action }     # unconditional action
       pattern {      # pattern with action
          action
       }

Items can be put on a single line without ambiguity using semicolons:

       pattern ; { action } ; pattern { action }

A pattern can have multiple patterns separated by a comma. That syntax admits optional line separation after the comma separators:

       pattern,
       pattern,
       pattern {
         action
       }

The action fires by a match for any of the patterns.

The POSIX standard Awk expression grammar has no comma operator, on the other hand; the comma exists only for separating patterns, and function arguments/parameters, and in the print statement syntax.

Plus, JNIL (just now I learned). The _in_ operator allows comma-separated expressions for testing "multi-dimensional" array membership. Here is a hello, world:

      $ awk 'BEGIN { a[1,2,3] = 4 ; print (1,2,3) in a }'
      1

(Note that multi-dimensional arrays in Awk are simulated; a string index is generated for that 1,2,3).

</comment><comment><USER20> One trick I use with awk, especially throwaway ones, is to use grep to subset the data before feeding it into awk. Often the case is using awk to poke at some data to diagnose a problem, not write a script to be run often or stuck in cron.

So to use an example from this nice short article: I might do grep GET log- file | awk blah-blah. Then awk doesn't need to consider the lines I don't care about. This is especially useful when iteratively writing the awk script.

<comment><USER21> I find easier to do awk /GET/{blah-blah}

<comment><USER20> Oh yeah, sure! I should have been clear that when dredging a really large log file or such it can be faster to run awk on a much smaller subset when your awk program has a lot of productions. I find it easier to think "OK, just run awk on these lines that matter."

Six of one half dozen of the other.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There are two use-cases I've run into where awk really shines, and is hard to replace:

1\. Writing scripts for environments that only have Busybox. Technically you can write scripts in ash, but I don't recommend it for anything beyond a couple lines. It's missing a lot of the features from Bash that make scripting easier, and it's easy to get mixed up if you're used to Bash and write things that don't work. Awk is the best scripting language available, even if you're doing things that don't exactly match what it was designed to do.

2\. Snippets that are meant to be copy+pasted from documentation or how-to articles. In that case, it's often not easy to distribute a separate script file, so a CLI "one-liner" is preferred. You also can't count on Perl, Python, etc. being available on the user's system, but awk is pretty universal.

For most other cases, I tend to create a new .py file and write a quick Python script. Even if it's a little more overhead, it helps keep my Python skills sharp, and often it turns out that what I actually want is a little more complicated than my initial idea anyway.

</comment><comment><USER23> Great post. I didn't know Fred had a blog. Fred's writing style never ceases to amaze me. His book on property based testing in Elixir was a better introduction for me to Python's Hypothesis than any of the other tutorials I found online on the topic because it made me think about discovering properties of my code. Would recommend it to others.

</comment><comment><USER24> One of the things I like to do with _mawk.exe_ under Windows is to automate the same command over a group of files.

Let's say the myPgm only takes one file name as a command line parameter, then I can so something like this:

        dir *.xyz /s/b | mawk "{print 'myPgm -x '$0}" | cmd

If the file paths have spaces in them, then you have to wrap the name within double quotes. I have found it challenging to output those in mawk -- at least easily any way. In this case, I have a windows version of _tr.exe_

In this case, I can do something like this:

        dir *.xyz /s/b | mawk "{print 'myPgm -x ~'$0'~'}" | tr ~ \042 | cmd

Although somewhat crude, it is effective.

<comment><USER25> Why not use good ol' for?

F.e for %f in ( _.doc_.txt) do type %f

<comment><USER24> I also need to do things like:

        docker container ls -a -q | mawk "{print 'docker rm '$1}" | cmd

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> So, I don't use awk right now. This answers "how to awk" more than "why use awk" for me (understandable given the 20 min claim).

Does anyone have concrete, practical examples of use cases where awk made your life much easier?

<comment><USER27> Awk '{ print $2 }' does LWSP gobbling.. cut -d' ' -f2 doesn't and this difference alone makes awk useful to me on a daily basis.

Awk has a hash like perl which is very efficient. I use an awk expression to print uniq as they come in counted through the hash insert on new instead of uniq which prints at end.

Awk count unique over 300,000,000 ips was as fast as perl and python and smaller memory footprint

<comment><USER28> If you just use awk for `{ print $2 }` then I would still prefer `tr -s ' ' | cut -d ' ' -f2`, since both are part of coreutils and with `awk` you would add a additional dependency to your script.

<comment><USER29> Why would being part of coreutils matter? Awk is part of POSIX, just like tr and cut. Even in very constraint environments you can count on it via busybox.

<comment><USER27> A perpetual argument is use of too many pipe separated distinct commands. The argument suggests it's lazy to use sed | awk | grep type pipe runs because in all probability sed or awk alone could have done it and you incurred two excess fork/exec() and therefore consumed kernel and userspace beyond your need. The usual rejoinder is "get nicked"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Nice intro. Awk is a useful tool when you want to do simple line-by-line processing.

Note: The article says that awk patterns can't capture groups. The _standard_ doesn't provide that functionality, but if you use the widely-available gawk implementation, gawk _does_ have that capability (use "match").

</comment><comment><USER31> Last year, I attended a tech event where Rasmus Lerdorf (the creator of PHP) was a guest speaker. When asked about his favorite programming language, he said: AWK. He didn't elaborate why but looking at this article, I think there is something to it.

</comment><comment><USER32> it's amazingly useful. I have used it since 1987, most recently today.

</comment><comment> globular-toast I recommend this article to people all the time and often come back to it myself. I don't use awk as much these days but when I worked in bioinformatics I was fluent and loved it.

</comment><comment><USER33> Every time I set out to use awk for some one time task I struggle to express what I need and end up saying fuck it and fire up vim and do exactly what I want with some quick macros.

Am I the only one?

<comment><USER34> I usually say duck it and dust off my shiny Perl necklace

<comment><USER35> I usually persevere and get it done in awk but then find the next time I need awk that I don't remember any of it and can barely understand my own examples.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> nice, I finally took the time to read the man pages for awk. And whipped out a script to count the number of errors occurred for a particular day for a postgres log file.

       cat logfile | awk '/ERROR:/ {counts[$1] = counts[$1] + 1}; END { for (day in counts) print day " : " counts[day]}' | sort

I just needed to know how awk programs are structured, the rest is just simple programming!

EDIT: I'm not sure if it's actually correct however...

<comment><USER37> Apart from the useless use of cat, since sort does the work here something like the following would probably suffice:

grep ERROR logfile | cut -f 1 -d ' ' | sort | uniq -c

<comment><USER38> There's really nothing useless about that use of cat: it makes the pipeline compose better from left to right. It's not like you have to pay 25 cents for each process you spawn.

<comment><USER37> So does the pipeline above.

It's not detrimental to performance since an empty cat is a no-op in a pipeline. You can have any number of them. But commands should be written for humans to understand, and inserting no-ops is a distraction to the reader.

In the trivial example, "grep needle haystack" reads better than "cat haystack | grep needle".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8893302](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8893302)

</comment><comment><USER40> This is a great intro; I have the GNU Awk user's manual bookmarked because there are a lot of features in gawk you will only rarely use but are quite useful.

</comment><comment><USER41> bwk talking about awk, C, etc: [https://youtu.be/Sg4U4r_AgJU](https://youtu.be/Sg4U4r_AgJU)

</comment><comment><USER42> This is the manual I needed the last 20 years.

</comment><comment><USER43> The pattern-action paradigm is really simple to understand and I suspect it's what made Sinatra style web frameworks stand out.

</comment><comment><USER44> Good tutorial. I like the concise survey of the language components. This is going to make working with awk a lot less awkward.

</comment><comment><USER45> #to print duplicate lines

        awk '++seen[$0] > 1' filename.txt

</comment><comment><USER46> Could remove line 32 and just put `{ flag = 0 }` before line 31, right?

</comment><comment><USER47> What's better than awk, are one-liner python programs.

Then, you can even alias it.

</comment><comment><USER45> Common lines between 2 files

awk 'NR==FNR{a[$0]; next} $0 in a' colors_1.txt colors_2.txt

[http://archive.vn/mmd80](http://archive.vn/mmd80)

<comment><USER48> The link doesn't load for me, but that seems pretty unreadable. I'd probably sort, merge, and print duplicates:

      sort -m <(sort -u file1) <(sort -u file2) | uniq -d

<comment><USER49> you can use comm as well

        # common lines
        comm -12 <(sort file1) <(sort file2)

        # lines unique to first file
        comm -23 <(sort file1) <(sort file2)

        # lines unique to second file
        comm -13 <(sort file1) <(sort file2)

regarding readability, it is the same with any new tool or programming language, you'd need to be familiar with its syntax and idioms, someone not familiar with command line and sort/uniq commands will find your solution as alien as well

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> One time I had a file and I needed all the values in a column and so I used:

      awk '{ print $2 }' my-file

And it gave me what I wanted. It was cool.

</comment><comment><USER51> To use Awk I tended, up on the ward I ended, it was awkward.

</comment><comment><USER52> sed grep & awk :)

</comment><comment><USER53> Awk in 2 minutes : google "awk this" and "awk that" :D</comment>


The 'Garbage' reason I don't get any code written - <AUTHOR> http://www.benjoffe.com/code/games/torus/

<comment><AUTHOR> I kinda feel bad about sharing this... spreading the addiction. <grin> Pretty awesome html5 game though.</comment>


Software company's response to Australian government abolishing migrant visas - <AUTHOR> https://www.rexsoftware.com/abolishing-457-visa-open-letter-malcolm-turnbull/ <comment><USER2> They should just replace the whole shebang with 'pay us $x to get a visa, $y for PR, $z for citizenship'.

Company wants to hire from overseas? Fine, they can figure out how to split the cost between company and employee, with zero government involvement. Rich people from the US seeking doomsday shelter? A few million dollars, a clean criminal record and less than 48 hours in the queue. Much easier than the current system.

<comment><USER3> A business investment visa already is that.

<comment><USER2> No, a business investment visa is an invitation to come over and set up a minimum viable, likely-not-profitable 'business' for the duration it takes to satisfy requirements. The government gets peanuts out of it, the 'investors' waste years of their lives playing pretend.

It's a shit show. Much better to just charge cash, speed up the processing and let in those who actually think they can make money despite the steep cost of entry. And if they fail anyway - reserve a small portion of the ticket price to put them on the dole.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > _I am sad when I look into the eyes of my staff on 457 or working holiday > visas .... How do I ask them to help us do our small but proud part in > sustaining Australia's economic growth and providing more jobs for > Australians and other immigrants?_

I know that this part is _entirely_ rhetorical, but the thought of a boss in tech coming over and trying to inspire me to do my work 'for the good of the country' is just too amusing. :)

</comment><comment><USER5> Just to make sure, the skilled point-based migration system is still in place in Australia? I.e. can you obtain a work visa and travel to the country to find a job there?

</comment><comment><USER6> On the bright side, India could benefit immensely from less brain drain.

<comment><USER7> They already are. Amazon, Linkedin, Microsoft, Uber etc have offices there, paying top talent to the tune of $60-$80/year.

For comparison, this is more than median tech salaries in London and cost of living in India is peanuts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Can someone give me some context here? So now it's impossible to hire foreign workers?

<comment><USER9> Companies are only meant to use the visa to fill a need/gap where there are no local workers to fill a job.

The minimum wage for the visa is $40,000 USD ($53k AUD).

What companies are doing however, is hiring foreign workers (typically from India for IT based roles) and paying them $40k rather than the local average wage of $75-100k.

They are using the visa as a method to decrease wage costs to almost half of what a local worker would cost.

I believe companies are complaining as there is a possibility that there will be less access to cheap foreign labour and they'll have to start paying true costs for workers.

<comment><USER10> I'm guessing you haven't had to try and hire devs in Australia before if cost of developers is what you think the main problem is.

<comment><USER11> I've recently had a pretty good look at the Melbourne software dev market and there are seemingly plenty of senior devs looking for work, companies here appear to have the "pick of the litter" when hiring.

Maybe you're just in the wrong part of Australia?

<comment><USER12> Melbourne is a positive outlier and not at all representative of the rest of Australia. Finding senior devs in Brisbane is an insanely arduous process and its not uncommon to see positions take 6+ months to fill (at least at the places I've worked at). Even when companies start throwing money around like crazy, the talent just isn't there.

I've heard that Sydney isn't so great either. Once devs hit seniority they run along to join a hip Melbournian startup, get gobbled up by Atlassian, or just migrate to Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER13> So what's the salary you're offering for this _unfillable_ position, and what's the average price of a home there?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Oh please. Spare us the pearl clutching. I'm willing to bet that if I filed a freedom of information act on this company's 457 applications that 1) there was little or no attempt to find a suitable candidate in the local market and 2) the 457s they did get have some relationship to employees already at the company.

The 457 visa was a government program that was being exploited, and quite obviously too, for quite some time, just like any government program eventually will be. For another recent example, look at what happened to the child care subsidy program. Government programs can serve a good purpose if they are well regulated and audited but comically and sadly for citizens they never are.

I just wonder if the 457 reforms would have taken so long if the Commonwealth Public Service had outsourced their IT to some South Asian consultancy and discovered that suddenly and mysteriously there were not enough skilled Australian IT workers to support them in Canberra (and elsewhere) and rather rapidly offices were filled with 457s. But this is exactly what large corporations in the private sector have done.

In IT and other sectors (notably health), companies are using 457s to save on employee salaries, pure and and simple. I have knowledge of assistants in medical practices being told to accept the lower salaries that their 457 co- workers are on or lose their jobs.

Oh, and it really annoys me what Atlassian founder Mike Cannon-Brookes keeps on saying. How about you invest in training locals instead of whinging all the time about not being able to import people?

BTW, I'm a UNSW CompSci graduate, 40+, have a lot of international experience, can operate at the technical and business level, speak a couple of languages, and after my last (5-year) contract ended I spent 2+ fruitless years searching for more IT work, while conspicuously the suburb I used to work in (with telcos, Cisco and software companies) filled with people from certain demographics. Despite all my experience, I didn't get invited to a single interview. Not one. Ageism and 457s killed the job market for people like me.

<comment><USER10> Atlassian hires tons of graduates.

> I spent 2+ fruitless years searching for more IT work, >I didn't get invited > to a single interview

If you didn't get a single interview in two years of looking either you are vastly overestimating your capabilities compared to your CV or your CV is junk. How many different CVs did you try during that time? What are you skilled in? You say IT work but are you a programmer, ops, support? What are you business skills like? How does ageism factor in when you didn't even make it to the interviews for them to be able to tell your age?

<comment><USER14> Are you really that obtuse? I write my CV. It has 20+ years of experience plus degree from my University. Simple math not your strong point perhaps?

<comment><USER10> If you have 20+ years of experience on your CV it's a shit CV. Why would anyone hiring care what you were doing over 20 years ago?

I'm wondering what else was wrong with it that you didn't get a single response in 2 years of trying. Were you including unique cover letters? Where were you finding the jobs you were applying to? Did you try going through a recruiter?

<comment><USER14> And now we get to the crux of the matter. I wonder how old you are? Why is it that in IT broad long-term experience is considered irrelevant? If you have not done _exactly_ that something in the past six months you might as well not exist. I love the conversations with recruiters/companies that go something like this:

Them: I see you you used technologies X,Y,Z in your last job. Me: Yes, and <I explain in further detail what that entailed> Them: Did you use <some tangential A-framework> with technology-X at all? Me: No, I used B-framework because reasons. Them: You are dead to us.

BTW, I find it puzzling you are focusing specifically on my perceived failure in the job market rather than the topic of the original post.

<comment><USER10> I'm in my mid-30s and I don't care how old you are I've worked with many excellent programmers in their 50s and 60s and learned tons from all of them.

Broad long-term experience isn't considered irrelevant it's just not needed on a CV. If you haven't done it in the past 5 years you're probably just not that skilled at it anymore and if you have it's already on the CV in the newer role.

Are you just imagining those conversations because you said in 2 years you never made it to the interview stage.

You are blaming your failure on the topic of the original post so it is relevant.

<comment><USER14> I was talking about actual in-the-flesh interviews, which are the only ones that count in the end. Recruiters/companies often do phone "interviews" or "pre-screenings" or whatever and those were the "conversations" I was referring to. So now you've called me a liar as well as having called my CVs "shit". What a pleasant co-worker you must be.

Edit: On that note, perhaps you could post somewhere an anonymised version of your CV so we can all benefit from the pinnacle of CV design.

<comment><USER10> So you've had interviews?

You shouldn't be so defensive of your CV but I apologize if I was rude. Plenty of mine were shit over the years too. I've had to read thousands over the years and discuss them with others so I have some idea of what turns hiring managers off. There is no need for that much history on a CV regardless of your age. You want your CV to tell the hiring person you can do the job. A full listing of all your work history doesn't do that it just adds pages to the print out that aren't going to be read and will probably annoy the person for having to scroll through them all since I assume you include other information at the end. 20+ year old educational qualifications don't do that. 5 years outside of uni you should drop it unless you have some particularly special and amazing qualification. Tell them if they ask.

I haven't needed a CV for like a decade now but rest assured my last one was pretty shit too.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Quick Thoughts On Android - <AUTHOR> http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2012/05/quick-thoughts-on-android.html

<comment><AUTHOR> A few notes

I have been playing Jeff Vogel's games since Exile 3. Its great how the rise of indie, Steam and Apple's stores have really improved his outlook. I started programming because I wanted to make games like his.

The content is in the comments. Most interesting is his experience in the market:

 _"Google Play has done pretty poorly for us. Amazon App Store has generated a decent amount of sales in the first 10 days, more than Google Play. (Yes, this is why I strongly advise not sticking with Google Play.) Total Android sales are still a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of what we've done on the iPad. Whatever the many good points of Android for users, it's not been good for us as developers."_</comment>


The Billionaire Behind Efforts to Kill the U.S. Postal Service [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.inthepublicinterest.org/wp-content/uploads/ITPI_USPSPrivatization_July2020.pdf <comment><USER2> There are various advocates for allowing the USPS to return to the banking business. They would put the exploitative check cashing stores out of business.

Ellen Brown's has written a copy pieces advocating for postal banking.

 _What We Could Do with a Postal Savings Bank: Infrastructure that Doesn't Cost Taxpayers a Dime_ \- [https://ellenbrown.com/2013/09/23/what-we-could-do- with-a-po...](https://ellenbrown.com/2013/09/23/what-we-could-do-with-a- postal-savings-bank-infrastructure-that-doesnt-cost-taxpayers-a-dime/) (2013)

This piece concludes by suggesting the postal service is being looted so its property portfolio can be sold off.

<comment><USER3> > C.B. Richard Ellis (CBRE), the company holding the exclusive contract to > negotiate sales for the $85 billion postal real estate portfolio, has sold > off 52 postal properties for at least $79 million less than their fair > market value. Worse, the buyers included its own business partners and > shareholders, including Goldman Sachs. CBRE is chaired by Richard C. Blum, > the husband of US Senator Dianne Feinstein, a family Byrne says has a > history of accessing public pension funds to make private investments

The more I learn about Feinstein the more unhappy I become.

<comment><USER4> It's probably not fair, but I give her a lot of credit for stepping up when Moscone and Milk were gunned down. Yea that was a long time ago and this is unrelated. Doesn't excuse it; I just try to remember what she has done for SF as a whole.

<comment><USER5> She stepped right up and took the opportunity to fly a confederate flag THREE times - all to curry favor from the Democrats. Even worse, especially in the light of current events, is that she attempted prosecution of the black activists that kept taking the flags down!

[https://lawandcrime.com/politics/feinstein-once-pushed- for-t...](https://lawandcrime.com/politics/feinstein-once-pushed-for-the- prosecution-of-black-activists-to-keep-the-confederate-flag-flying-in-san- francisco/)

<comment><USER6> The flag had been there for 14 years. The one witness account in the Snopes story says that the raising of the Confederate Stars and Bars was accidental, and occurred many weeks after Feinstein ordered the removal of the long- present Confederate battle flag upon a 3-day-long protest that ended with an official removal request which Feinstein immediately granted: [https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dianne-feinstein- confedera...](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/dianne-feinstein-confederate- flag/)

I don't think Feinstein is that politically craven. She has a spine, and a relatively rigid one at that. Rather, her poor judgment, such as it is, is all her own.

The Koch brothers and other anti-government radicals bank on the political disaffection that such historical revisionism generates. If every politician is a stooge, then there's no virtue in politics or government. Feinstein is no stooge, and while I wouldn't vote for her in most years, IMO she deserves respect as a strong, steadfast, and effective leader who almost incidentally blew--and continues to blow--many stereotypes of women out of the water. (And you can be all of those things, BTW, while also having flaws and a history of mistakes.) She definitely doesn't deserve a cheap character assassination.

<comment><USER5> Hey, thanks for the link. Sincerely. Clearly, there is more to the story than I first assumed and understood.

I do think there is still some debate about the timelines involved, though. A 1984 article in the Harvard Crimson indicates that the Fort Sumter flag was raised prior to the California 100 flag: [https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1984/5/9/a-viable- alterna...](https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1984/5/9/a-viable-alternative- pi-am-not/?page=single)

But the Snopes article indicates that Bradley brought down the California 100 flag in favor of the Fort Sumter flag.

I didn't intend to "revise history" by my post. Hopefully no one takes it that way.

<comment><USER6> I didn't mean to imply that _you_ were trying to revise history; I was referring to the article you cited, and in turn the Bayview article cited by that article.

For sure one wonders exactly what was going through Feinstein's mind during those 3 days. She's a deft, successful politician so I have little doubt there was some self-serving motivations at play. But her defiance and obtuse expression of authority in the face of a lawless action (however just) is textbook Feinstein. And it taking only 3 days for her to order its removal is fast even by today's standards, and even in San Francisco.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Something I don't normally see discussed re privatization of US Postal Service is that it doesn't appear to be a novel idea.

Singapore's postal service, SingPost, is a publicly traded company[1].

The UK's postal service, Royal Mail, is a publicly traded limited company[2].

Germany's postal service, Deutsche Post AG, is a publicly traded company[3].

Japan's postal service, Japan Post, is a publicly traded company[4].

I'm also yet to hear a convincing argument as to why the USPS enjoys a monopoly in first class parcel mail. That is to say, sure let's keep USPS state owned / public, but why can't FedEx/UPS/Amazon/DHL compete with the USPS?

[1] [https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/quote/S08.SI/](https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/quote/S08.SI/)

[2] [https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/rmg?countrycode=...](https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/rmg?countrycode=uk)

[3] [https://www.boerse-frankfurt.de/equity/deutsche-post- ag](https://www.boerse-frankfurt.de/equity/deutsche-post-ag)

[4] [https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/6178.T?p=6178.T&.tsrc=fin- sr...](https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/6178.T?p=6178.T&.tsrc=fin-srch)

<comment><USER8> There's no incentive for public companies to serve rural areas.

<comment><USER9> You're being downvoted because most people believe it when FedEx or Amazon or UPS say they serve 100% of Americans. There's no way they would do so if they had to have the same footprint as the USPS.

Is Amazon going to run ships around the Great Lakes to deliver mail to vessels moving between ports?

Is FedEx going to send a truck an a four-hour round-trip to deliver a single letter to someone on an indian reservation for 50¢?

Is UPS going to charter bush planes to deliver mail to remote outposts in Alaska, Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands?

There are post offices so far out in the middle of nowhere that while they have a concrete pad for handicapped parking because it's required by the ADA, no customers ever arrive by car, so there's also hitching posts for people's horses, which is the primary mode of transportation. I don't see Amazon doing that. It'll just say, "Wait 20 years for your mail while we work the bugs out of our super-cool drone delivery service!"

<comment><USER10> > Is Amazon going to run ships around the Great Lakes to deliver mail to > vessels moving between ports?

No, because using planes to deliver to regional distribution centers is much more efficient.

> Is FedEx going to send a truck an a four-hour round-trip to deliver a single > letter to someone on an indian reservation for 50¢?

The USPS does not deliver mail directly to the majority of reservation residents. Most have to fetch their mail at the closest office, which could be upwards of 1 hr away from them. This is because most reservation residences don't actually have an address (which also prevents them from registering to vote, which is another related issue).

> Is UPS going to charter bush planes to deliver mail to remote outposts in > Alaska, Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands?

The USPS doesn't either. The USPS's Alaska Bypass has a minimum order weight of 1000 lbs, it's designed for retailers. The USPS does not serve normal consumers in very rural areas with standard mail features.

<comment><USER9> _No, because using planes to deliver to regional distribution centers is much more efficient._

How do planes and distribution centers get mail to people at sea for months at a time?

 _The USPS does not deliver mail directly to the majority of reservation residents_

You're not wrong. But there are plenty of people in remote places on the rez who do get mail hours from the nearest trading post. Just because they're not the "majority" of people doesn't mean they don't deserve to be served.

 _The USPS does not serve normal consumers in very rural areas with standard mail features._

Either you and I define "rural" differently, or you haven't spent as much time in rural places as I have.

<comment><USER11> Since they mentioned the Alaska bypass, they're probably talking about areas that are only accessible by air. There's a situation kinda similar to the epacket thing with China. USPS subsidizes package delivery in isolated areas to the point that it's cheaper for the sender than deliveries to urban areas

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Perhaps we should allow a private arm of the postal service to enter another area important for communication: internet service. As it is now, internet service is restricted to one or two providers in most regions. Prices are ridiculously high compared to the rest of the world. And broadband in the US is denied to many low profit areas. Yet we are in a time of COVID sanctions, schooling and working remotely that all rely on the net. Broadband supply needs more competition. The postal service is already delivering snail mail. How is it they were never tapped to run the internet in the US but instead we allow oligarchs to bleed us like Baron Harkonnen in Dune?

<comment><USER13> I would be _thrilled_ to pay USPS as an email provider or ISP, even paying a premium to do so, if they offered comparable service in my area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The USPS missed a golden opportunity in the 90s. Almost no one had an email address in the early 90s. The USPS was so afraid of email they refused to embrace it.

They could have been the email address of record for everyone in the US if they just set up a forwarding address for anyone who wanted it.

Heck, they could even do it now.

Imagine having a free firstname.lastname@example.com email address that someone could only send to if they paid for it, like the way mail works now.

That is the business they should get in to, along with killing all the check cashing places by being a bank for unbanked like they used to be.

<comment><USER15> In France the post office (La Poste) did this from 2000. It did have success, in the following years a lot of people used it as their main email service. They even were mandated by the government to automatically provide an account for all school students.

But they couldn't keep up with more modern services. Their webmail and storage was laughable compared to Gmail and others, and people moved on. They still operate, but it's basically just for older people who never changed now.

Post office companies can't compete with tech giants on email services.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> We are building a just-in-time distribution network on top of USPS (Bottomless - YC W19) We're able to deal with their slowness because we predict demand in advance using data from a smart scale.

It's quite astonishing how unreliable USPS is. We frequently see packages get routed to a totally incorrect part of the country, derailing shipments for several days.

Also, it seems like even USPS doesn't know when their packages will arrive. The estimates they give are worse at predicting arrival time than just inputing distance into a simple regression!

<comment><USER17> Do you have any comparisons to other services? I've most often seen UPS route things bizarrely and I've had several packages delivered a day or two late.

<comment><USER16> We are USPS only at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why does the postal service need to turn a profit? It's a government agency. Are any other government agencies required to be profitable?

<comment><USER19> It's not so much a government agency as it is a public corporation. In the days when the postal service was founded, large corporations were rare enough that they had to be created and initially funded by the government. Now we have financial markets and concepts that allow for the streamlined creation of large corporations, but it's closer to the modern concept of a utility than anything else.

<comment><USER20> It hasn't always been a public corporation. USPS only dates back to 1970. Previous to that it was the US Post Office Department, a cabinet-level agency. It was reorganized in 1970 in response to a strike:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._postal_strike_of_1970](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._postal_strike_of_1970)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This is interesting timing, given the recent UPU changes that should help shore up USPS by reducing the losses they experience from international mailings. They estimate that this causes 400M in losses each year [0].

Though, overall, this has been a long arc of slowly trying different ways to gut or kill the program in the last ~40 years.

[0] [https://mailingsystemstechnology.com/article-4596-The-US- Rem...](https://mailingsystemstechnology.com/article-4596-The-US-Remains-in- the-UPU-but-Changes-Are-Ahead-in-2020.html)

</comment><comment><USER22> One of the most memorable passages from Cliff Stoll's "Silicon Snake Oil" was about the reliability of snail mail. How you could scribble a person's name on a postcard, mess up a lot of details, and it still manages to get to them.

</comment><comment><USER23> Postal banking works really well in the countris in which it exists.

The best way to help USPS is to use them as your default shipping method: do so.

<comment><USER24> why would I want to help the USPS at a cost to me?

<comment><USER25> because you're only considering short term monetary cost at the _cost_ of long term benefit

<comment><USER24> how so

<comment><USER25> Mail going through the USPS has a right to privacy. Mail through commercial carriers does not. Unfortunately that privacy often doesn't get factored into the cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It seems like Koch wants to keep pushing consensus to privatize the postal service by weakening funding for it, which is, either intentionally or unintentionally, economically harming it. I'm on the fence over whether 'kill' is the right word for this though.

</comment><comment><USER27> It often feels like the social contract in American society is breaking down. Many of the rich elite in the US care nothing for the common person, and only adhere to their bubble of the wealthy and powerful. Crushing institutions that help people, or blocking the creation of new ones that might, are done so for ideological reasons even if practically speaking they might work or help people out.

At some point the wealthy and political in the US might have somewhat acted in the interest of the American people. But now it feels like almost every move is to the detriment of the average person.

If things continue like this, America is in real trouble.

</comment><comment><USER28> Haven't finished reading it, but I was not surprised that the Koch family is behind this special interest group.

The family has been fucking the US and world long before Trump was elected. They have a history of funding fake climate change science in order to push favorable legislation for the O&G industry.

Anything that might benefit society (healthcare, social support, ...), they have fought against or funded a PAC to do their dirty work.

</comment><comment><USER29> The US Postal Service should be funded like NASA. It can contract out to companies like Amazon - just like NASA contracts to SpaceX.

</comment><comment><USER30> James Buchanan's ideas and Koch money are the subject of Nancy MacLean's 2017 book "Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America"

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30011020-democracy-in- ch...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30011020-democracy-in-chains)

<comment><USER31> "Democracy in Chains" is irredeemably flawed, and has been completely discredited by a series of prominent reviewers.[1][2] There are many more reviews which reveal the scope of fabrication in this book, but it suffices to say that the work should be considered 'fiction', perhaps in the 'fantasy' category.

[1] [https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/jel.20181502](https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/jel.20181502)

[2] [https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/jack_rakove_reviews_dem...](https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/jack_rakove_reviews_dem..).

[3] [https://www.vox.com/the-big- idea/2017/7/14/15967788/democrac...](https://www.vox.com/the-big- idea/2017/7/14/15967788/democrac..).

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Why can't the US Gov bail out the USPS like big banks?

<comment><USER33> Because corporate welfare is good because it'll create jobs and put money in the working man's pocket and anything with social value is a waste/drain on our strained resources and we'll have to raise taxes and you can't do that!

/s

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Getting rid of the USPS has tremendous national security implications. It's a "network" that doesn't rely on the internet.

Imagine we had to deliver a vaccine to everyone within a week. The USPS knows everyone's address and where people live. They would be the go to institution to do this.

</comment><comment><USER35> Skimmed this long PDF after getting clickbaited by the headline and it begins with the premise that without the USPS, we would be left only with email

>The federal agency plays a crucial role in U.S. supply chains, commerce, and basic communication—which email simply cannot replace—by processing and delivering nearly 500 million pieces of mail on an average day.

But I did have a number of questions like,

Wouldn't it be bad if we abolished the post office since there's always been one in my neighborhood?

Why does this person have a particular issue with a quasi-governmental agency that is a rounding-error in the federal budget? What about the trillions in defense and deficit spending?

Isn't 90% of what comes to my mailbox spam that I just forward on to the landfill?

Do most other countries have a public postal service? Why or why not.

Don't I avoid the post-office at all costs unless there's an automated kiosk that happens not to be out of service?

Why is this on Hacker News?

<comment><USER36> _Why does this person have a particular issue..._

No one knows for sure. This person also has issues with other tiny pieces of the federal budget, such as the CPB.

Various theories are advanced, such as political strategy (kill mail-in- ballots, NPR is seen as leaning slightly left) or profiteering (the USPS has a large pension fund, perhaps an appealing target for a corporate raid).

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> The amount of narcissism these people (the Koch's, for example) have is just astounding. If you're a billionaire, what could possibly be a reasonable explanation for why you even care about the post office? Why are these people so hell bent on hurting people to feed their own narcissism?

The USPS could be improved but struggles primarily due to active efforts to kill it off. But it's a wonderful idea of a service that definitely should exist and be improved. What's next to kill off? Libraries? Public schools? The USPS, libraries, public schools provide basically guaranteed service to anyone, anywhere. They're wonderful institutions. Are they perfect? No. But very few institutions are, and these provide a helpful service to people. We should focus on improving them instead of spending so much money to kill them.

I've learned that the USPS has free package pickup since someone is basically guaranteed to be in your neighborhood every day, which has been a wonderful service during this viral breakout. By having USPS pickup my small packages, it keeps me out of their stores away from other people and employees. I simply purchase a label online and schedule the free pickup, next day if it's a weekday. It's a minimum of $11 for UPS to come pickup your package at a residential address, even if they're already coming to your address for another delivery that same day.

<comment><USER38> Its easy to point at a greedy billionaire who wants to ruin [insert public service here] so that he can squeeze out another dollar for himself.

But have you considered that they _genuinely_ belive that minimal government and more privatization leads to overall better results? It might just be that they have good intensions, that they really wish for a better outcome for all.

I don't share that view, but i do think that there is a fraction of hardcore liberterians that truly believe we'd be better of without many of the government-founded services such as libraries, schools etc. - and while i do not agree with that, those people are still entitled to their opinion and are allowed to lobby for it.

<comment><USER39> > But have you considered that they _genuinely_ belive that minimal government > and more privatization leads to overall better results? It might just be > that they have good intensions, that they really wish for a better outcome > for all.

Yes, and that makes it even worse. They're so out of touch with common people and so insulated from routine everyday life, their opinion shouldn't count for anything.

I don't care if joe programmer on HN or Jeff the General Contractor at the bar are advocating for dismantling the post office because of libertarian ideology, because they have neither the power nor resources to affect change.

I do care when insanely wealthy billionaires who are completely insulated from the rest of society argue for horseshit like this because they have power to change it, and it's for ideological reasons.

It's pure narcissism to argue for a position that would negatively affect millions of people when the one arguing for change wouldn't suffer one damn bit and in effect disregard everyone else's suffering for their ideological bullshit position.

The existence of billionaires combined with Citizens United is an actual problem, the post office is not.

<comment><USER37> I agree with you in that wealthy people are given too much power in the U.S. In the U.S., becoming wealthy has somehow become a fast pass to do basically whatever you want and inflict change that could affect millions of people negatively or be self-beneficial (to the wealthy person) or both.

Allowing individuals to accumulate so much wealth is just not good for the common people, and the fact that our government is so inept at managing money isn't a good enough reason to allow individuals to reach such power and wealth. If they are allowed to accumulate such wealth, there should be much stronger laws preventing their influence in government policies.

<comment><USER40> Almost like a warlord. They have the power to rule us (albeit indirectly) with their wealth and lobbying power instead of weapons and fear.

<comment><USER41> When I saw that Jeff Bezos increased his wealth by $13 billion in a single day recently, when 28 million Americans are facing potential eviction, I just thought...we have kings again.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I can't imagine the number of tons of paper and c02 we would save the planet if we got rid of it. All they do is deliver spam that's thrown away. I fully support selling it off to private companies.

</comment><comment><USER43> [https://facts.usps.com/table-facts/](https://facts.usps.com/table-facts/)

From those figures it looks like > 90% of the USPS throughput benefits the marketing operations of private companies and scammers.

</comment><comment><USER44> It's funny how it's painted as malice and conspiracy, while the arguments on the other side are grounded in research and theory. The Kochs are the left's Soros conspiracy.

<comment><USER45> Is that those two french brothers who tried to publish fake physics papers?

<comment><USER46> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_and_Grichka_Bogdanoff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Igor_and_Grichka_Bogdanoff)

I'm speechless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I can imagine a future without the USPS. A future where I don't have a weekly chore of sorting through the spam to decide which to throw away and which to recycle.

And a future where I don't have giant boxes "delivered" into my tiny mailbox that could fit maybe a stack of 25 envelopes.

And a future where 20% of packages don't arrive.

I can see why people want to avoid this.

</comment><comment><USER48> I would say that losing to China so that it is cheaper to post from China to USA than from local to USA is a big deal. If they can get it cheaper than DHL, but slower and still hold onto the great ride of goods moving ... Just if

</comment><comment><USER49> I hope the billionaire is successful. For some reason every other courier that delivers to my address manages to bring my deliveries right to my doorstep - UPS, FedEx, DHL, Amazon, GrubHub, local pizza restaurants, etc. all manage to enter my apartment complex, locate my unit, and leave my items right at my door. The only exception is USPS, which consistently leaves a slip in my mailbox pretending that they "had no access" to my apartment, even though the gates are wide open during the daytime when they arrive. Instead of delivering my items, every time I have to drive several miles to the Post Office the next day, mask up for Covid, and wait in the long line to retrieve my packages.

Every aspect of my experience with USPS is dissatisfying - they can't be defunded soon enough.

</comment><comment><USER50> The USPS's primary revenue source is as a Spam delivery service. That basic problem is why it has refused to modernize. Anything with any significant value is already sent via Amazon, FedEx, DHL or UPS, or hand-delivered (in the case of really valuable stuff).

See:

[https://www.insidesources.com/outbox-vs-usps-how-the-post- of...](https://www.insidesources.com/outbox-vs-usps-how-the-post-office- killed-digital-mail/)

The USPS has to be reformed and it needs a new purpose in life, other then stable government job for people. There needs to be significant value that others cannot meet. The reformation that is needed is being blocked.

For example, how about allowing me to pay $5 a month to not have you deliver crap into my inbox? Or to fully digitize the process, so I don't have a recycle bin full of crappy products, alumni magazines, and pizza coupons that I don't need or want.

Oh. And stop selling my data to third parties as well. Looking at you NCOA database.

<comment><USER51> "...any significant value is already sent via Amazon, FedEx, DHL or UPS"

And then those things are handed off to the USPS for "last mile" delivery to the millions of rural addresses that UPS and FedEx don't delivery to directly with their own vehicles.

USPS serves some very critical purposes, and ensuring mail 'works' for all citizens, even those with deep rural addresses, is one of them.

<comment><USER52> I live in a rural area. The nearest USPS delivery is at a post office 11 miles away. UPS and FedEx deliver to my front door. It has been the same in two other rural areas I've lived in. New Mexico, California and Arizona. I've never lived in a place that USPS delivered to that UPS and FedEx did not.

<comment><USER53> UPS and Fedex can be 3x the price to deliver to remote areas. I work for e-commerce company and we ship Usps to certain zip codes with USPS. I am sure USPS loses money on these shipments especially to Alaska where the surcharge can be up to $30 with UPS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Having lived in four different US states and in a number of European countries (currently resident in Germany), all I can say is good riddance.

USPS is by far the worst mail service I have ever encountered. It's so bad that there's absolutely no doubt in my mind that one can do a lot better, assuming one is allowed to compete. And even though they proudly say they receive NO money from the federal government, they do receive subsidies in the hundreds of millions.

<comment><USER55> All of the other major delivery services in the US (UPS, FedEx, DHL, Ontrac) are horrible and far worse than the USPS. And without the USPS to compete against, they'd be even worse.

<comment><USER13> To say nothing of the fact that other delivery services frequently rely upon USPS for last-mile delivery in more rural (read: less- or un-profitable) areas, and those areas would simply not be served by a privatized postal service.

<comment><USER55> Yes, without the USPS lots of people would have to drive into the nearest town to get anything, and presumably letters would become completely cost- prohibitive to send even to people in cities.

But even setting these things aside, USPS is almost always a better experience as either sender or receiver than any of the other competitors in the US.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Windows Terminal Preview v0.8 Release - <AUTHOR> https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-terminal-preview-v0-8-release/ <comment><USER2> Can't wait until this is installed by default. Because as much as I like it trying to get corporate IT to install it is just too much.

<comment><USER3> They let you download the .msixbundle file on Github. You can unzip it with 7-zip or some other zip program. And then you can unzip the file CascadiaPackage_x_x64.msix which will give you the WindowsTerminal.exe binary. That should let you run it without admin rights.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> And Vim is still not usable unfortunately: [https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/1203](https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/issues/1203)

<comment><USER5> Vim is definitely usable. I don't use a block cursor, so perhaps that is the reason I don't have issues, but I've been using Vim without issue for some time now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really wish they added a GUI configuration editor - editing large JSON files by hand is a poor user experience IMHO.

<comment><USER7> Same complain, it was the same problem when VS Code was first release. Also Json makes a poor configuration file format because it forbids comments. Hype- driven development is annoying because it doesn't weight solutions on their technical merits.

<comment><USER8> I think yaml would be good a fit. In almost every scenario where I have to edit the file manually yaml is my favorite option because of comments and general readability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Been using command line more and more had no idea this existed. Looks much better, any downsides?

<comment><USER10> The version I've been using has been crashing every once in a while, but the much bigger issue at least for running WSL is the lack of copying from the terminal.

<comment><USER11> Out of the box you can copy from the terminal by selecting with the mouse and then right clicking. It is also possible to copy using the keyboard but there are no default key bindings at this time, so you need to configure the binding you prefer yourself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Retro Terminal Effects

What about a Retro Start Menu that is usable and ad-free? Maybe in a few decades...</comment>


How the Twitter Grinch Stole April Fool's Day - <AUTHOR> http://technologizer.com/2011/04/01/how-the-twitter-grinch-stole-april-fools-day/

<comment><USER2> I liked AFD just fine, pre-Internet. The problem is, this kind of humor is tolerable in _limited doses._ But now - on AFD - everybody in the frickin' world is trying to gag everybody else in the world, and the non-stop stream of stupidity gets old pretty quick.

I had hoped that the HN readership was above posting all of this garbage here, and would leave it to Reddit and Slashdot - but sadly that appears not to be the case.</comment>